Feb 14 2001
A Ripe Peach
poem by Brian Charles Clark
We talk around each other every day—
you, me, all of us—ever intermingling
fluids, emotions, and still carrying
close to the chest a cool reserve of cash
dense as privacy, and just as precious.
Flamenco on a tightrope, this is what we call
getting next to someone. Tenderness
is such a volatile substance. Some folks’d
rather smoke cigarettes than be visible.
I want you to talk to me about this
in a bad way—a way bold as the night,
but tied together by ribbons of glass,
and transient as light. In the clench
of arms, cunts, mouths, we materialize
from the quotidian trenches and I say
all else is media. Funny that we should emerge
from the fire covered with mud, and that
what should be ash
is still the liquid of recognition
seeping forth from our pores.
These are some of my thoughts as I
contemplate the ogres, demons and
succubi coursing through my veins.
Ripples in the wave-form dunes,
we’re part of a pattern, that’s what
we are, where biology eclipses reason,
and in the penumbra we writhe
and drink with our skins. Your fingertips
imprint me, but I test clean
behind goldenseal and cayenne. No wonder
we shave our heads, and read the alchemical
classics. For what, these practices?
To tame? To harness? As a mere human,
what control have I? I know
these resolutions of words
transfix us like food, breathing in
the seismatic semiosis,
tectoid pulse of blood, it seems to me
we either believe in the script of law
of the heedless rhythms of hormones.
Careful child, every teacher has
never told me, poetry is full of loopholes;
here, they never continue, everything
means anything. What is the fiber
used to weave intimate speech?
What passions grind your teeth down
in sleep. my Sisters? I gasp to you
across genders, this chasm
of cultural chaos, this grain sprouting
out my ears. These are some of my questions,
gulping water like a rabid dog.
God damn the wall! I gulp and sputter
and continue, I’m soaked, and my butthole stinks
more dead than alive. I welcome
your inquiries, but please find your way
to within six inches of my face, further away
I can’t focus—steam my glasses,
this graffiti threatens to be a scribble,
just a b.b. of paint spattered. Exhaustion and rhythm
continue to confound, propaganda
unearths assumptions, desires palpable
and obtainable, if at great sacrifice
and destruction. What webbed feet I have,
to wade into these waters with you, I guess
I’m wondering if poetry is biology, or
what the fuck I think I’m doing.
Loving, making, teaching. Taking?
Melodies harp, I disbelieve my name,
forgotten in the whiskey mists of my father.
My poor mother, we are our fathers’
penultimate victims, and the bitterest stroke
is passing on the slap—and they say
the word once spoken can never be retaken.
Such lies.
I didn’t get this right the first time,
what am I going to do
with all these love poems, is this
a feeling I’m supposed to get over?
What’s my shoulder up against,
resisting every notion of love’s transience?
Am I being patrilogical in my insistence
on honoring the diffuse intensity of my passion?
The geography of experience:
access permeable over bumpy disks,
or bit by bit on the straight and narrow,
I am as tough as a ripe peach.
I guess if we’re to communicate
from here on out it’s going to be difficult –
I wouldn’t know what to say if I weren’t
so loaded. I haven’t been able to feel
my love for you, so what now cracks,
why do I hear you writing back to me?
I can hear my name clamoring like a bat
in your belfry. Perhaps we’ll die again,
and be reborn, I, your smart sister.
I would have been there that night, awake,
like Saturn’s light alert, and writing you poems.
We want to coalesce into rings
but cannot. I ask you bodily, Sister,
is the utopia we seek in this lifetime?
Or are we crushing herbs to give vapors
to future generations? Again, you make me
shiver in the shaman wind:
What is this man about you that needs me so?
Shut me up, contradict me,
cross this little ribbon of words
with a kiss and a plan.
